RIASS stuff:
Review: Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand'Rating: 
Lots of drama in this one, and you may need tissues.
Review: Preincarnate by Shaun Micallef'Rating: Deliciously silly.
My former colleague, Proust, and Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant'Rating: 
A hero with a terrible skin problem
Sorry for being a touch lax on the bookish links front. Life beckons, Im afraid!
Other bookish stuff:
Nick Lakes'In Darkness has won the Printz award (see my review). Katherine Applegate has taken out the Newbery for'The One and Only Ivan; Jon Klassens'This is Not my Hat.
Are books being put off books because they see them as too cute and feminine?'(and on the flip side, why are boys being socialised to believe that things that are cute or feminine are off-limits?) (PDF)
Lessons learned from submitting to magazines and publishers'Celebrate rejection. I'm not kidding. Each rejection is a chance you gave your story to live in the minds of readers; each, an opportunity to toughen your writerly skin.
An interview with Christopher Priest (Larry from OfBlog has provided a partial translation, but to read the whole thing youll need to be a Spanish speakerwhich sadly I am not.) My 1984 novel,'The Glamour, is going to be adapted for film in the UK by the director Gerald McMorrowWe have hopes that shooting will begin this summer. (The Glamour, by the way, was one of my favourite books last year.)
Courtney Milan on author profit and loss'The truth is, though, that making $10,000 sixty years from now is not the same as making $10,000 now. I have to figure out how much I value having money sooner. What I end up doing to approximate the time-value of money is to make some reasonably positive assumptions about years one and two for all cases, and to neglect the income from years three to infinity.
The case against authors blogging'To blog well means to spend quite a few of your precious authorial hours working on something which is not a manuscript. Not only must you spend time writing blog posts, it takes time as well to build up your following. That means time spent reading others blogs, commenting on them, and becoming part of the greater blogging community. I dont run a separate author blog and dont really have any intention to. RIASS takes up an inordinate amount of writing/reading time already, and Im not really convinced about the value of blogs/websites as a sales tool for most authors.
An interview with Kate Forsyth'Why was fantasy so hot then [in the late 1990s] (and now)? I believe it is because readers had got so tired of self-referential post-modernist texts and were longing for a return to narrative. Crime and romance and other strong narrative genres also became very popular around that time, and continue to sell very well.
Books that authors cant stop re-reading
How do you keep up the joy of writing?'I've found, personally, that I have a sort of mental 'bank account' that fills up with triumphs and successes in the things that matter most to me, and depletes with failures and admissions of defeat. If writing is going badly it's a drain on the reserves. A slow trickling debit. But it can be offset by little credits in other areas.
Top ten things you might not know about the Newbery award'The committee is not allowed to consider any book from another year. This means, if a book under consideration is a sequel, the committee may only look at that book, not the previous ones. Nor can a committee consider an author's body of work. Only the book of that year will be considered.
An interview with Lyda Morehouse'I tend to meander when I think and novel writing allows me to do that in my creative thinking, too. You have to be a very skilled, precise and yet expansive thinker to be a good short story writer. I'm just not sure I've honed all those skills' at least not all the time.
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